Looking through the webstats today, I noticed one of the rererring sites was enigmatically listed as 'hiderefer.org'. I was interested to see what this site was, and going to the url, it looks like it is a free service to bounce links off to hide the original page with the link on it.

After a little bit of senging (thats 'search enginge searching' ie a google-less way of describing 'googling' - although I think I might have just made that word up) I found a forum called the Black Hat Forum which uses hiderefer.org to post links on it's forum. That way, any links back to your site are masked so people cannot trace back any discussion on black hat SEO and negative SEO techniques.

After some further senging, I discovered this page: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackhat-seo/black-hat-seo/197604-removing-site-off-google.html - this seems to make sense since there has been a lot of activity on the negative SEO article that I wrote, and it could be that this link is the source of some of the extra traffic to the site.

I managed to find out what hiderefer.org was hiding, however if the forum page was masked from the search engines, I wouldnt have a clue where the referral originated.

Another method of referral hiding is tiny url rewriting. This is provided by services such as bit.ly, shorturl.com, tiny.cc, is.gd and a few others - theres even a google one: http://goog.ly. A very simple process- you enter your long url, and the website provides you with a shorter url. Using this short url, you can mask your referral source. If you use one of the bigger ones, then there is very little chance of being tracked back (unlike the hiderefer.org one which includes the target sites url in the link). Heres a really useful table of features for popular url shorteners:

http://searchengineland.com/analysis-which-url-shortening-service-should-you-use-17204